Gluten-free style from the Emerald Isle – Menu Plan Monday

About a month ago, Duck and I went to Ireland to participate in his sister’s wedding to a lovely Irish boy. (Boy? Man? He’s younger than me and quite hip, but maybe getting married gives you an automatic bump up to “man.”)

Things I was prepared for as I headed to Ireland: Serious difficulty and perhaps impossibility in sticking to our normal food regimes (vegan for him, gluten-free vegetarian for me). Ireland has has a much better climate for raising food from the animal kingdom than the plant one, and that means meat in and with everything. An unavoidable abundance of gluten; after all, drinking Guinness is one of the national pastimes, and that’s basically a big, dark, delicious glass of wheat. A whole bunch of new people to whom I would have to explain my dietary requirements and get funny looks or a frenzy of worry.

What I totally did not expect on my journey: Walking into the local Super-Saver and finding nearly half of a huge aisle devoted to gluten-free products. Pita bread, tender and fluffy; garlic-coriander naan, the perfect combination of crisp and soft; ciabatta rolls with a toothy crust an Italian grandmother would approve, just waiting to be layered with fresh mozarella, basil, and tomato. Table water crackers and digestive biscuits, which I thought I would never eat again. Scones with raisins. Pizza crusts that make Kinickinick look like rank amateurs. All of it packaged, not bakery-fresh and on the verge of going stale, happy to sit quietly on the shelf and be brought alive with the barest of toastings. I even found Worcestershire sauce that is both gluten-free and vegan, which I thought was like a mermaid or a unicorn, something only to be dreamed of but never actually encountered. Ireland even came up with the coolest not-that-healthy health food ever – thin rice cakes topped with a layer of that sweet yogurt that coats yogurt-raisins. (They come in chocolate-orange, too!)

Needless to say, I came home with an entire carry-on full of food. I’m trying to ration my new treats (they all have expiration dates around mid-July), but this week’s (retroactive, as usual) menu plan includes some full-on celebrations of Irish, gluten-free bounty.

For other marvelous menu plans, check out the huge Menu Plan Monday compendium over at Organizing Junkie. For more gluten-free menu plan madness, pay a visit to Cheryl at Gluten Free Goodness. She is hosting this week’s Gluten-Free Menu Swap.

Monday: Homemade falafel with baba ganouj, heirloom tomato, red leaf lettuce, and Sriracha hot sauce, stuffed into an incredible gluten-free Irish pita, kale with kale sauce

Tuesday: Broiled tempeh marinated with fennel, soy sauce, and apple cider vinegar (Moosewood at Home), roasted broccoli with lemon zest and pine nuts, quinoa with coconut oil

Wednesday: Gluten-free Irish pita stuffed with broiled eggplant (marinated in balsamic, olive oil, and herbes de Provence) and feta and buffalo mozarella marinated with balsamic, olive oil, and fresh basil, fruit salad, green salad

Thursday: Rice, lentil, and potato pilaf with cardamom, Impressionist cauliflower, spicy collard greens, gluten-free Irish garlic-coriander naan

Friday: Sauteed broccoli rabe with garlic and chile flakes in a gluten-free Irish pita with Bravo farms cheddar cheese

Saturday: Gluten-free Irish pizza crust topped with pesto, tomatoes, mushrooms, and broiled eggplant marinated in balsamic, olive oil, and herbes de Provence, salad

Sunday: Dal with potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and ginger, red and white quinoa, raita of goat yogurt with mustard seeds and spices

The thing of it is, I don’t even care much for bread products. But until this week, I had forgotten how amazingly convenient they are. One night I was super tired but I really wanted to cook up two gorgeous bunches of organic broccoli rabe (my absolute favorite veggie, but I rarely find it organic, so it was a real treat). But after cooking them I was so tired that I was kind of like, well… what now? Will I just have vegetables for dinner? But then I grabbed a pita, tossed it in the toaster for a minute, and made a mouth-wateringly scrumptious sandwich with white cheddar cheese and sauteed broccoli rabe. No long-cooking grain, no need for mind-bending creativity, and absolutely no stiff, crumbly, barely-worth-the-title GF bread. Most of the time I love the challenge and creativity of GF cooking, and I love that it calls on me to make, not buy, most of the elements of my meals. But sometimes it sure is lovely to have a break – and not feel cheated or deprived when I do.

Sweet, sweet night

On Thanksgiving, as on all Thanksgivings, we ate and ate and ate. Thanks to a menu that leaned generally towards the healthy side, I actually didn’t get that traditional, but painful, groaningly stuffed feeling. I felt just right – like I had feasted but not overindulged. However, there was still an entire dessert course waiting to be conquered – or would it conquer us?

Vegan Chocolate Mousse with Whipped Cream and Fruit Preserves

We decided to go for a walk. After much bundling up and changing of shoes, we all trooped out to Golden Gate Park. The whole neighborhood was nearly deserted, even usually-bustling Haight Street was dark and silent. We moved in and out of happy, chatting pairings between old friends and new acquaintances. I led us in a big loop through the park and the Panhandle, but it didn’t really matter where we were going. This wasn’t actually about the fresh air or the exercise or the sightseeing. This was about making room for dessert!

Poached Pears in Spiced Red Wine Syrup

We returned home having found a few crevices and crannies in our bellies where just a bite of something sweet might possibly find a home. Duck and I had planned the dessert course with even more military precision than the rest of the meal, attending to the balance between chocolate, spices and fruit, making sure to include a complement of traditional holiday flavors, and supplying beverage choices ranging from tea and coffee to a honeyed, floral dessert wine.

Dessert:
Chocolate Mousse with Whipped Cream and Fruit Preserves (recipe follows)
Pumpkin Pie from Crave Bakery (review follows) *not vegan
Poached Pears in Spiced Red Wine Syrup (recipe follows)
Chewy Ginger Cookies (recipe follows) *not GF
Muscat de Beaumes de Venise
Coffee & tea selection

More on each dish follows…

The Accidental Mochi, or how I stopped worrying and learned to love pancakes

I’ve been meaning for a while now to post reviews of some of the gluten-free products I’ve been cooking with. Celiac disease and gluten-free eating are really rising in the public consciousness these days, which is wonderful because there are so many more options now, from convenient snack foods that return easy choices like cookies and crackers to our pantries, to guaranteed-gluten-free oats. Oats, which don’t even naturally contain gluten, have had in the past such a likelihood of contamination that they used to live permanently on the “no” list. But now, at last, several companies are making the effort to ensure that their oats are processed in a gluten-free environment, returning oats to the “safe” list for many people.

Mochi-like pancake made with Trader Joe's Gluten Free Pancake Mix

But this proliferation of choices means what it always means – some of these new products are awesome, and some are so-so, and some are just, well, gross. Some don’t deliver what they promise, whether that’s bread you can enjoy without toasting or cake mix that makes something actually resembling a cake. And some are so good that they by far transcend the category of “gluten-free substitution” and can (and should!) take their rightful place on any table, dietary restriction or no.

Tinkyada brown rice pasta is one of these heavenly foods. I sang its praises in an earlier post; its perfect texture and creamy flavor actually brought pasta back into my life after maybe a decade. It’s interesting to me looking back now – there are a lot of foods other people seem to love that rate with me from indifference to loathing on the likeability scale. Pasta, cake, cookies, sandwiches, and pancakes are all things that I can generally do without. But now that I know gluten and I are very much not friends, I have to reevaluate my distaste. Have I unknowingly come to dislike these foods because they’ve made me sick in the past? Have I come to unconsciously associate their particular textures and mouthfeels with fatigue and gastrointestinal distress? Or do I genuinely not like them for themselves? I certainly continue to adore well-made bread pudding and really good French baguettes.

Okay, enough speculative musing, time to get to the point. Duck and I made a rare shopping trip last weekend to Trader Joe’s. While we were there we came across their Trader Joe’s Gluten-free Pancake Mix, which I had never seen before. Breakfast has been a real struggle for me lately – I can’t eat bagels, and I’ve stopped eating eggs until I can source them from a place where the chickens aren’t killed after two years. Duck very sweetly asked if I thought I might eat gluten-free pancakes if he made them for me. Even though I generally shy away from pancakes, who could resist such an offer? (Which, in addition to being incredibly sweet, isn’t even a rare occurrence; Duck makes breakfast for me several times a week.)

The mix itself was vegan, but it called for two eggs and milk in the preparation. Duck used Ener-G egg replacer and rice milk, and brought the first pancake out to where I was bundled on the living room couch. It was lovely and perfectly golden-brown, dotted with Bonne Maman Four Fruits jam. “I think the pancakes came out sort of… funny,” he said, handing me a fork. I dug in. The pancake was elastic, almost gooey, as I cut into it.

The first bite was heaven. I love mochi, which is sweet glutinous rice pounded until it becomes soft and pliable and, in my opinion, perfectly textured. There’s nothing quite like it, and I often dream of making it at home, but I’ve heard it can be quite complicated. Well, I’m here to tell you, making mochi is a snap if you have Trader Joe’s Gluten-free Pancake Mix! Or, if not exactly mochi, then something close enough that even as I enjoyed my “pancakes” with berry jam I was already dreaming of a future experience with them involving sesame oil and scallions. I don’t know if the effect will be the same if you use actual eggs, or if the whole recipe became something of a binder overload between the arrowroot, tapioca, and other sticky things attempting to replicate the cohesion of both gluten and egg.

I feel like I was given an unexpected gift today. A gluten-free pancake mix that yielded fluffy, doughy pancakes would have been a passable way to get my morning calories. Instead I got something surprising and wonderful, a new treat made with one of my favorite textures of all time. They say gluten-free cooking opens up new possibilities, and right now I am definitely feeling it!

Pesto, pasta, wow!

One thing about summer – you get a lot of the same foods in your box, over and over again. A glass-half-empty type might yawn “Boring!” and roll her eyes at the six-millionth bag of basil, shoving it in the back of the fridge next to the other limp and blackened bunches. But a perky glass-practically-brimming-full type will see this as an opportunity to really stock up, to get ahead on the endless task of feeding her family. For the first, exhausted half of the summer I would use a few leaves from each bunch of basil, pairing them with some tomatoes or garnishing a dish, and then, sad to say, the blackening and wilting would begin in earnest. But the basil, undeterred, kept arriving each week, each bunch fuller and more bountiful than the last.

Gluten-free spirals with vegan pesto, roasted zucchini, and tomato

It was time to do right by this basil, I finally decided. The thing is, I don’t like pesto that much. It’s often too oily and sticky and rich, and sometimes I even get a gross little rash around my mouth when I eat it. But that’s what you do with massive quantities of basil, you make pesto. I do like to always have pesto on hand that I’ve frozen into ice cube trays so I can throw a cube or two into soups and other things that need a little boost, so I figured I would just fill a lot of ice cube trays.

My family has a beloved heirloom pesto recipe that has been passed down to me, but I ventured out to find recipes for vegan pesto so that the basil bounty would be edible for all members of the household. I came across several versions, including some that were just the usual pesto recipe without the parmesan cheese, but Duck and I had already tried this as a basil puree and had found it too strong and sharp without the cheese to mellow things out. The one that sounded best to me was this vegan pesto recipe from the vegan blog Vegan Spoonful that uses nutritional yeast in the place of the cheese.

I was dubious at first, because everyone is always trying to claim that nutritional yeast is “just like cheese!” “Put it on your popcorn – just like cheese!” “Make vegan mac and cheeze!” But no, no, it’s not like cheese, and don’t insult me by pretending that it is. Duck was the designated pesto processor, so I had him make a small batch to start so we could taste it and see what we thought. Ladies and gentlemen – when it comes to pesto, nutritional yeast is not just like cheese, nope, it is BETTER. All the creamy, mellowing effects, with none of the greasy heaviness. This was some of the best pesto I’ve ever tasted. Duck blended it all, using bunch after bunch of basil that had been stockpiling in the fridge. We ended up with a huge jar of pesto which I resolved to get into freezer trays as soon as possible.

But my freezer plans went out the window when Duck cooked dinner that night. He prepared a batch of Tinkyada gluten-free pasta spirals, roasted chunks of zucchini in the toaster oven, cut up sweet, fresh summer tomatoes, and stirred all of it up with our shiny new pesto.

It has been years since I’ve enjoyed pasta. I don’t like simple carbs very much, wheat makes me sick, and I OD’d on it in college before I was a junior. But this Tinkyada brown rice pasta is incredible. It has a toothiness that is one of the best textures I’ve ever put in my mouth. And considering that gluten-free pasta is generally known for its horrid texture, this is nothing short of a miracle. And, combined with the yummy roasted zucchini (another vegetable that shows up week after week without mercy), the juicy tomato, and our heavenly pesto, this pasta dish is quickly becoming a dinnertime favorite. The other day I finally decided I’d better put the pesto in the freezer in case it started to go bad. I fetched the jar and looked inside – there’s about enough left from our huge jar’s worth to maybe make another bowl of pasta. Clearly I’ve been converted!

Recipe follows…